


Long Way Home

by Phoenixflames12



Category: Poldark - All Media Types, Poldark Novels
Genre: Gen, Minor Violence, POV Male Character, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-20 02:42:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3633681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoenixflames12/pseuds/Phoenixflames12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'How was the war, sir?'</p><p>'As any war, ma'am.'</p><p>'A waste of good men.' </p><p>Ross Poldark; late of the American Wars struggles to come to terms with his turbulent emotions at the beginning of episode 1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Way Home

Long Way Home

He glances at her through the dusky, afternoon light that was heavy with rain; her whalebone bound body bundled in a travelling cloak with a hat festooned with flowers; oval eyes pale with disturbed sleep. The carriage is stuffy with the stench of too many bodies being crammed together; the air wet with the squawling cries of the baby who was overheating and unhappy.  Mrs Teague’s youngest daughter; returned from London and ready to be the social butterfly her mother had dreamt of in the concise circle of upper class Cornwallian society.

 

He can feel two sets of eyes on him; scanning him, sizing him up; taking in the shadow of his scarred face, the haunted bruises that caress his eyelids.

 

He can almost hear the whispers; tucked discreetly behind fans in the sun splashed drawing rooms of late summer Cornwall; scandalised hands and wide eyes fluttering frantically in a dramatic picture of a quiet, brooding monster lately returned from the wars.

 

Is he really such a monster?

 

His grip on the carriage curtain tightens involuntarily; his brain spiralling without any due consent back to Virginia, back to Jamestown; back to the blood, the choking, desperate cries of his doomed men, the dark rivers of stinking scarlet soaking the rain soft earth.

 

Perhaps he is then. A monster. A monster that could do nothing to save his own, to at least try and protect them from the savagery of the enemy forces. Automatically, he sense his fingers creep upwards to trace the semi-healed scar that slices his cheek; that thin, sharp reminder of what he had lost during those fateful minutes on a rain soaked Virginian afternoon.

 

Outside the sun is beginning to set; slipping down the violet horizon in a graceful curtsey of fire kissed gold; the pale, rain shredded clouds beginning to slip away into the shadowed sky. It would be dark before they reached Truro and even if he found a fast horse, if Jud were not there to meet him; night would have firmly settled itself by the time he reached Nampara. His bad leg aches at the thought; the sudden sharpness of the pain that he has grown almost accustomed to making him exhale a breath as he stretches it out to relieve the too taut muscle.

 

The girl looks up at the sudden break in the silence; and before he can cut his gaze; their eyes meet. Her cool, grey eyes remind him of the pebbles that littered the stony beach at Nampara Bay; soft in their girlhood innocence and yet not without a strain of the innate curiosity that came with childhood.

 

‘How was the war sir?’

 

Her question has a sense of enquiring innocence to it; but to his tortured mind; it is loaded with a meaning he would much rather try and forget. A meaning that he had seen countless times ever since he had emerged back into the land of the living after the blood stained butchery that was the Yorktown siege under General Cornwallis.

 

_‘Why did you survive?’_

_‘Why you, when so many of our men; good men; are dead?’_

He doesn’t have an answer and wishes that he did.

 

His head feels heavy as he lifts his face from the darkness of his travelling cloak to meet her still enquiring gaze.

 

‘As any war, ma’am’. The words feel hard and grating to his tongue as he forces it around the short, hard syllables; keeping his gaze lowered to his travel worn hands.

 

‘A waste of good men’. It is only then; only when he has said it aloud; as he had heard it screamed so often in the dark recesses of his own mind back in the ghastly death trap that was the field hospital he had woken up in; just west of New York, that he fully understands it.

 

Her eyes widen at that; that oh so subtle bite of fear clouding the pale, clear irises; her mouth tightening as she holds his gaze; the only crack in the façade being the slight movement of her teeth as they worried at her lower lip.

 

They remain silent for the rest of the journey. Not that there is far to go; the horses were slowing to a walking pace as they began the climb up into Truro. The coach began to sway; the dark little box reminding him of the ship by which he had returned to England a few days earlier; the voyage a blur of the remnants of the fever he had contracted in Jamestown and trepidation at what would await him on his home soil.

 

The coach turns into the familiar cobbles of St Austell Street with a lurching jolt that woke the baby into a sudden fit of tears as it rocked its’ way past the late afternoon shoppers. From the driver’s seat, he hears the blast of the horn and a sudden, plaintive shout from a ragged group of urchins who chase the coach until they swing disjointedly into St Clement’s Street, the wheels squelching laboriously through the mud.

 

His eyes take in everything; everything that remains the same; as if the wars in France and America had not happened; as if the world was exactly as he had left four years ago. It’s a ridiculous notion; he knows that; but a desperate one that he clings to anyway; hoping against hope that the feelings that he had felt, tramping down the grass on the cliff top outside Trenwith house with Elizabeth would still be felt.

 

With a flurry of shouts, a stamping whinny from the horses and the yell of the driver, the coach pulls up at the Red Lion Inn. The swaddled infant’s cries have receded into soft, gurgling murmurs and for that his nerves are glad as the thin parson and his wife with baggage in tow bustle out into the puddles of mud and rainwater. He lingers; watching the face of the girl as she casts him a quick, askance glance before gathering her skirts and daintily thanking the postboy with all the demure courtesy that befitted her upbringing and education as she stepped down.

 

‘May I ‘elp you sir?’ The boy’s face is pale and pinched; a regular sign of malnourishment, he thinks shrewdly; yet earnest as the grey-blue eyes watch from the door; taking in the slow, deliberate movements he makes as he attempts to stand; gritting his teeth for the briefest of moments as a flicker of the old pain catches his lame leg; refusing to let the old memories that had so often plagued his semi-conscious, delirious state back in the field hospital overwhelm him.

 

‘Thank you, but I think I can manage’, he hears his voice reply; reply as if it comes from someone else entirely; and steps down from the coach slowly, forcing his lame leg to remain straight. Each step still remains an effort but he is home; or at least as close to home as he can be before reaching Nampara and for that small blessing he is grateful.

* * *

_**Fin** _

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please feel free to read and review! Comments, suggestions, questions etc are like chocolate to my brain!
> 
> Much love and enjoy x


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